Station B, on the way to save the game business, is busy

Text | Zinc scale, author | Meteor, edit | Wen Jie

Station B probably ushered in the moment when we need to face up to our own bottlenecks.

In the beginning, it was precisely by relying on the game agency business - more accurately, through the huge revenue brought by the phenomenon-level mobile game of "FGO", the exclusive agent, that Station B was able to go public on the NASDAQ in 2018. However, after the listing of Station B, it took the initiative to choose to "take off the hat of the game company".

This statement seems to think that Station B voluntarily chose to "cross the river and tear down the bridge" for the game business, but the actual situation is more like the game business of Station B conservatively maintaining the way of playing channel intermodal transportation, and failed to board the ship of the new era of "research and transportation integration", thus being far behind the tide.

Nowadays, the media's rhetoric has changed from accusing Station B of relying too much on game products for revenue to questioning the fall of Station B's game business. Affected by this, Station B also began to increase the game track and wanted to reactivate the engine.

However, the operation of B station in this regard is slightly intriguing - on March 15, the media exposed that B station has newly invested in a game company, and surprisingly, the main business of this game company called "Game Valley" is a series of web game products.

"It's 2022, will anyone still play a knife 999 page game?" This is the complaint of many players after hearing about this matter. People can't help but ask, is the B station game business really to the point of being in a hurry to go to the doctor?

The market is discussing the cold winter, and B stands on the investment page tour

2022 is a turning point for the domestic game industry.

The suspension of version numbers, the tightening of regulatory policies, the prevention of underage addiction... These clichés have once again slowed down the development of the game industry. In addition, more than a year has passed, and the player dividend brought by the epidemic to the entire game market has been consumed by most of it, leaving enterprises, especially those small and medium-sized enterprises that are not too large, to have fewer and fewer opportunities.

According to data from the Tianyancha APP, between July and December alone, 14,000 game-related companies were written off in 2021. In the whole of 2020, this number is only 18,000. The severity of the "cold winter" can be seen.

In this context, thinking became a big event for enterprises, and they began to discuss going to sea, buying out games, metaversic social networking and virtual artworks, seeking ways to break through and save themselves. As a well-known mobile game agent in the Z generation player group, Station B is also in this trend of change, and the commercialization process of its main station has gradually entered the bottleneck, forcing it to refocus on the game industry with a very high gross profit margin, and the means it takes are also very conspicuous, such as poaching and retiring star players to form e-sports teams, invest in game companies, register "BILIGAME" trademarks and so on.

Of course, these operations are not called "miracle tricks". For large manufacturers with abundant funds, whether it is e-sports or investment in game companies, it is just a "routine operation" with a relatively mature system and relatively small risks, such as the game giant Tencent in the past two years, it has also saved enough energy to "buy, buy and buy" and expand a number of research and development teams.

However, although Tencent's "buy, buy, buy" operation is a bit rough, its subsequent game strategy is actually more obvious, that is, to increase the number of overseas tracks, and recommend the game industrialization system to challenge the boutique AAA games.

The investment purpose of B station in the game market is not so clear, but it is like casting a wide net. Take the four game companies invested by Station B from March 10 to March 17 as an example, two of which are two-dimensional, IP mobile game developers, a host independent game developer, and a previously mentioned web game developer Beijing Roaming Valley (referred to as Game Valley, the company is also engaged in mobile game research and development business).

Quadratic, console games, page games... Four companies and three tracks. In depth, the reason why Station B chose to invest in the first two is not difficult to understand.

For example, investing in two-dimensional game companies. Although Station B maintains the strategy of "pan-quadratic" to get close to the mainstream culture, after all, the basic disk of ACG enthusiasts is still there, and the experience of operating quadratic games as an agent after listing has accumulated a lot of experience for them, and it is not surprising that it will choose to continue to cultivate in the field of quadratic games.

Investing in console game developers can be seen as the embodiment of Station B's close follow-up with the trend of high-quality games.

In fact, Station B began to pay attention to game products other than mobile as early as 2020, and also exclusively represented "Driving the Train Together!" Indie game products such as "Delusional Flaws", "Demon Hunting" and "Heavy Bird" also represented and heavily promoted a wave of Galactic Castlevania games "Shadow Torch City" for consoles and PC platforms last year. Unfortunately, because these products themselves do not have outstanding highlights, coupled with the large number of card drawers on the B station, the consumption habits of buy-out games have not been purchased, resulting in most of these game products being mediocre and not bringing much revenue to the B station.

As for investing in page game developers, as mentioned earlier, the revenue data of page games has plummeted, and the living conditions are worrying.

According to the "2021 China Game Industry Report" data, in 2021, web games are still shrinking, accounting for only 2.03%, and sales revenue and market share continue to decline.

There are complex reasons behind such ugly data. On the one hand, the rise of mobile games has robbed the player resources of page games; on the other hand, it is also related to the overall rough quality of page game products and the loss of players in outdated operations. Of course, the suspension of flash updates at the end of 2020 also caused the page game market to lose a large number of creators and game content.

In short, under the influence of a variety of factors, the fact that page games are dying has become a fact that the industry does not earn, and few people in the market continue to be optimistic about this market segment.

And B's choice to invest in page game developers in the context of its own stock plunge and investor confidence decline is really confusing.

The End of the Page: Decline, but there is still room for respite

For the "post-00s" and "post-10s" gamers who grew up with the rise of mobile games. Browser games are a distant and questionable field.

It is said to be "distant" because after the rise of mobile games, the game time of these young players in China has basically been "divided and eaten" by the products of the two platforms of mobile and PC, and they rarely take the initiative to contact the declining page game products, so they have a sense of distance;

And it is questioned, the reason is more direct, because the quality of most of the page game products is indeed very bad, they leave a negative impression on the player, after the player's word of mouth, has completely broken the reputation of the page game product, many players will have the domestic page game products "plagiarism and skin change", "false publicity", "can not play without money", even if they have played the number of page game products are very small, or even never played the page game.

However, for most of the "post-80s" and "post-90s" players, browser games have played an important role in their gaming careers. The reputation of web game websites such as 4399 and 7K7K has spread throughout the country with the help of microcomputer classes on campus.

In addition to the flash stand-alone mini-games on websites such as 4399, the page games at that time were mostly some top-down ARPG, turn-based RPGs or SLG products, and the gap between the screen and the entire end game market was not particularly obvious, and the game experience could also compete with the end game, and even appeared "Tianshu Strange Talk", "Magic Academy", "Proud of Heaven and Earth" and other game products with a lot of popularity.

Compared with client games, the non-downloadable feature of page game products enables them to be modularly combined into various websites. After the rise of social media, leisure page game products have become the "winning tricks" used by major forums and communities to strengthen user stickiness, among which the leisure page games represented by "Happy Farm" once became popular in the circle, and its core "stealing vegetables" gameplay has also become a household name on the Internet.

According to media reports, in 2009, the active users of "Happy Farm" reached 16 million, which was 3 times that of the popular terminal game "World of Warcraft" at that time.

However, just when people are looking forward to the bright future of page game products, the development of the page game industry has taken a sharp turn, and it has gone downhill without turning back.

As for the reasons for the decline of page games, some of them have been mentioned in the previous article.

The first natural is the impact of mobile games. With the development and popularization of smart devices, mobile game products have gradually appeared on the C position of the game stage, although players are still required to download APP, but their volume has been much smaller than that of PC platform client games, making the process of downloading games no longer long.

Moreover, thanks to the portability of mobile devices, mobile games are more in line with player fragmented game habits than any previous market segment, truly achieving "anytime, anywhere, point-and-play".

In order to overcome the rise of mobile games, console, PC games quickly found the target, that is, the amount of heap, there is no need to reduce the volume of the game, as long as you continue to enrich and optimize the game textures, modeling, system, text files and other game content materials, so that the game quality reaches the point where mobile games cannot be surpassed, you can occupy an advantage in the competition.

However, web games are limited by performance issues such as flash plugins, browsers, and web servers. It's hard to carry huge and beautiful game content. Coupled with the fact that the browser game market at that time has formed a way to quickly harvest the blood of players with small costs and short-term clumsy game products, companies will rarely be willing to face the income risks faced after increasing development costs. This makes web games produce almost no breakthrough game products in the subsequent development process.

Not only is it difficult to fight mobile games, but even the strength to wrench wrists with new era client games has also dissipated, so that the decline of page games has become a fateful thing, and many page game manufacturers have even taken the initiative to abandon the page game platform and choose to join the mobile game track.

However, in the eyes of some game practitioners, although the page game is miserable today, it is not to the point of no cure.

A chengdu independent game producer Mermaid Pill said, "There are still many products in the page game market that are very moist, especially some old SLG products, these games take the style of roll-on operation, and there are many middle-aged players with strong economic strength as whale players to support the game operation team." ”

Fish ball pointed out that more than 80% of the players in the page game market are up to 30 years old, and these middle-aged players are not well adapted to the mobile game products that have become more and more cumbersome after the quality of the current quality is continuously upgraded, and the Krypton gold card drawing mechanism that cannot be directly strengthened by recharge. The simplified operation of the page game (such as various automatic battles and automatic pathfinding functions) and the straightforward recharge system are more in line with their appetite, and the gameplay such as guild wars also pokes at the social needs of this part of the player. So it is not difficult to understand that some people are willing to pay for "garbage" page games that are despised by young players.

Taking the well-known page game manufacturer Kaiying Network as an example, its well-known page game product "Legend of the Blue Moon" has exceeded 3.9 billion in the four years from 2016 to 2020, which has surpassed most mobile game products, which shows that page games still have a strong ability to absorb gold for audience players.

"For middle-aged players, page games are a very friendly game product, only need to recharge a little money, do not need to invest too much energy, you can harvest the happiness of rising combat strength." And these games do not need to be downloaded, even in the working hours, you can also open the web page 'touch the fish', some page games even stuffed with the 'boss key' function, to help office players escape the supervision of the boss, it can be said that it is quite intimate. Fish balls added.

However, the number of elderly players such as "post-80s" and "post-70s" is very limited, and not everyone has a strong willingness to consume games, in the context of the overall game market turning to Generation Z, page games that cannot be supported by young players can rely on older players to "continue to live", and it is difficult to have further development in the future.

So, what exactly does the page game bring to station B

Domestic page game products may indeed be able to "hang a life" with the support of middle-aged players, but it is limited to this.

And B station investment page game, is it just to expand the "post-80s" or older user groups? Obviously also unrealistic.

"Regarding the reasons for B station's investment in page game companies, I am afraid that it will go back to B station itself." Investor Wang Hu believes that after the B station released the fourth quarter and annual financial report of 2021 in early March, the net loss data reached a new high, many investors have realized that the expansion of the B station loss has not been exchanged for the development opportunities to match it, the revenue data and user growth that B station has been proud of can not hide the fact that the company does not make money, and as the Z generation users gradually saturate, the future user growth and activity of the B station are not optimistic. Therefore, investors' confidence began to gradually drain and they chose to leave Station B.

"Many investors have been aware of the fact that B station users are not valuable, in this case, it is difficult for B station to continue to use user data as a selling point to reassure people's hearts, the only way is to continue to develop some businesses with high gross profit margins, solve the profit problem as soon as possible, or let investors see that the profit problem may be solved." Wang Hu added.

For Station B, the live broadcast business and game business are the key to recent profitability. However, the game business is lagging behind and is looked at by the market, and if you want to slowly adjust your game business structure, I am afraid that the market will not give itself so much time.

In this case, only a "surprise win" can be managed. Choosing a browser game may be a strange trick.

"Looking back at the history of the page game industry, we can see that social networks play an important role in the process of web games reaching their peak, social networking sites give page games a huge user base, and page games return to social networking sites with a high degree of user stickiness and efficient monetization channels." Fish balls said.

He pointed out that the main body of the B station is still the video community, the mobile game products it represents have a natural barrier with the main station on the medium, and with the increase of game products, the willingness of players to actively contact new games will decline, while the connection between web games and video sites is closer, and the operation from the main station to the game can be completed through the same browser, and the web game does not need to be downloaded, that is, click to play, the player has a lower entry threshold, and there will be a greater chance of contacting and entering the page game product recommended by the website.

Of course, this idea sounds very good, but from the perspective of the community atmosphere of the game area of Station B, it is almost impossible for players to take the initiative to click into the page game advertisement recommended by the website.

In fact, Station B has posted page game ads on the main site page, but from the user's feedback, the voice of complaining is far more than the discussion of the game product itself.

However, these negative reviews from players are often limited to traditional skinning page game products.

"Page games are just a type, there is nothing wrong with it, the reason why the reputation of page games is so bad now, mainly because the quality of game product content is not good." As long as you put your heart on the content, page games can also attract young users. Just like the two-dimensional page game products of game platforms such as DMMs and Cygames, they have a considerable audience in the domestic and Japanese markets, and most of them are young Generation Z groups. Fish balls introduced.

Indeed, such as the game platform Cygames mentioned by FishMaru, its popular page game "Blue Fantasy", also broke out at the end of last year that it was registered by Tencent with a domestic domain name, or will be introduced by agents, which also confirms that such products do have a lot of commercial value.

Station B has a huge two-dimensional user basic disk, if you can launch a page game product for the two-dimensional group, you may indeed be able to let some players "take the bait".

But unfortunately, the game valley company invested by station B, its page game products are basically various SLG and ARPG page games with traditional ancient style themes, and the subsequent development of mobile game products is only to port the same "painting style" game to the mobile terminal platform, which is far from the word "two-dimensional".

"For now, Station B's investment in the game valley is more like showing investors, indicating that it is 'trying' to increase the game track." Its practical significance is far less than its investment in several small workshops or independent game development teams. Wang Hu said.

In this way, how much help can the game business of station B fall behind get from a small page game manufacturer, the answer is probably not satisfactory to the market.